Predators
by Arctic Banana
Summary: Wimpod was a weak and pathetic pokemon that existed only to be food for someone bigger. Guzma was just a kid with no friends from an abusive home. Both had something to fear from predators who wanted to hurt them. Maybe one of them could do something about it...


_This story is somewhat based off of a comic drawn by real-faker on tumblr. It hit me right in the feels when I first saw it and motivated me to write this._

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Golisopod's days as a wimpod had been full of fear, as was expected for a small creature who couldn't defend itself. He lived on a beachfront on Melemele Island, an extreme rarity for his species which was already exceptionally rare, as he'd been washed onto the island from the one he'd called home after being caught in a storm and swept into the sea. Being a small prey pokemon was awful enough, he also had to contend with the fact that he was a small prey pokemon surrounded by predators without any other wimpods to provide him with safety in numbers.

He'd adapted to a nocturnal lifestyle after losing a few legs to an overly curious lillipup belonging to a tourist and after getting stepped on by a beachgoer who didn't see him hiding in the sand from a pelipper he'd seen flying overhead. At night, he still had to contend with the threat of the occasional raticate that had wandered onto the beach looking for food, but for the most part most of his threats were asleep for the night. Or so he thought.

Wimpod hadn't even had a chance to finish regrowing his missing legs before he had several more of them torn off by some wingulls that happened to still be up and hungry late one night. Wimpod thought for sure he was done for. He would be torn apart and eaten by wingulls right there on the beach, like a magikarp that would never see its full potential as a gyarados.

Luck seemed to be on Wimpod's side that night, as it was the same night that Guzma had decided to take a long, late night walk on the beach to escape from another one of his father's drunken rampages. He heard the commotion of the wingulls and decided to investigate as it was unusual for them to be so active at night and saw that five of them were fighting over a scared and badly injured little wimpod.

The wingulls weren't so happy with being chased away from their food and two of them even tried to attack him, but this didn't deter Guzma from pulling wimpod straight out of their beaks and fighting them all off with rocks and garbage and anything else that was lying on the beach within reach. Eventually after he managed to badly knick one with a rock, the wingulls decided the prey wasn't worth it and flew off, leaving Wimpod to Guzma's mercy.

Wimpod was missing so many legs now that escaping would be an awkward process. It would take him weeks of molting to regenerate them all. Had Guzma merely set him back in the sand and released him into the wild, he no doubt would have been eaten by the next predator to come across him. Guzma seemed to realize this as he made no attempt to release him.

At first Wimpod was instinctively fearful of Guzma. Everything to a wimpod was a predator, and the only reason he could fathom for why Guzma would have saved him from the wingulls was so that Guzma could eat him himself. He cowered underneath Guzma's dark colored jacket, which prevented him from seeing where they were going, and soon found himself indoors in one of the buildings that was located across from the beach.

As a wild pokemon, Wimpod had never before been inside of a pokemon center, so he didn't know what to expect. Moments before he'd wanted out of Guzma's grip so he could escape, but upon entering the building and seeing someone standing nearby with a hungry looking fearow, he retreated back inside the jacket, using it like a makeshift hidey hole to protect himself from the fierce predator.

When Wimpod traded hands from Guzma to yet another stranger, he felt even more scared than ever since this meant that now he didn't even have a sheltering jacket to hide from and he was now out in the open. He wondered why he could have possibly been passed along. Was this some kind of human courting ritual? Did one half of the pair catch food and give it to the other half as a gift? Or was he to become food for someone's offspring?

Every obvious answer for why a predator would want to catch him flowed through his simple mind at once. It was probably the most scared he would ever be in his life, even more so than he'd felt on that beach when he was subjected to the wingulls' savage feeding frenzy.

And then in an instant, that fear began to evaporate as he noticed the pain in his body slowly starting to numb and be replaced with a feeling less hurtful. The gentleness of the nurse's touch through his treatment, the lack of any pain despite his injuries, and the pleased expression on Guzma's face when he was finally handed back to him suddenly made him realize that this human wasn't going to eat him, he was trying to help him! Wimpod still regarded humans as predators after that, but Guzma was not considered one of them. Something about him was different.

He was not taken straight home at first. Guzma still wanted to stay away from his father's wrath after all. As they sat on the beach, Wimpod felt much safer in Guzma's arms than he would ever feel wandering the beach like he had been earlier. He'd never officially been captured, but as far as Wimpod was concerned, he'd rather stay with the human teenager who'd just spared his life than live on an unfamiliar beach any longer.

Luckily for him, Guzma didn't release him and order him to go back home. It seemed he realized just how much Wimpod appreciated his kindness and instead of setting him back in the sand and sentencing him to a short lifespan of being chased by predators, Guzma once again tucked him inside his jacket and brought him back home, hoping that neither of his parents noticed the pokemon that he was smuggling into the house.

Wimpod was easy enough to hide from them. He just hid under the bed, only coming out when Guzma told him it was safe to do so. Wimpod never knew why he was so desperate to keep his parents from finding out about him, and he'd likely never find out about the scatterbug that Guzma had caught as a child or the horrible fate it had suffered after his father had gotten drunk and angry at him for no reason. He did find a photograph hidden behind a dresser of Guzma holding a caterpie, but as there was no caterpie to be found within the household, Wimpod could only imagine that something horrible must have happened to it too. There was evidence in Guzma's room that he had won several battling competitions, but no pokemon in the house. One could only wonder how many he'd had that were no longer with him now.

Guzma had been accustomed by that point of sneaking food from the pantry or bringing his own in from out of the house, so feeding Wimpod was as simple as giving him a few crackers, Wimpod's favorite food, every night. Sometimes if Guzma was lucky enough to actually be fed, Wimpod would get a few food scraps that he snuck away from the table, such as chicken bones and those gross snap peas that Guzma refused to eat even if he was starving to death on the kitchen floor. It was very fortunate that he was a scavenger by nature, as such a diet would probably starve a better pokemon.

If Guzma snuck out of the house, he'd do it with Wimpod tucked inside of his jacket. If his father was currently on the rampage, Wimpod would hide in the furthest corner under Guzma's bed until the danger passed. If Wimpod heard Guzma crying at night when he could no longer pretend that everything that was happening to him wasn't actually affecting him, Wimpod would break cover to crawl into bed with him and offer him some comfort. It was during these moments that Wimpod wasn't scared of someone coming into the room unexpectedly and finding him.

Over time Wimpod became less fearful and more angry. He was angry at Guzma's father for beating him senseless for every little thing that he did or didn't do, and angry at his mother for both smothering him like he was still a small child and acting as though nothing was wrong and the abuse was perfectly normal. As long as she wasn't the one being subjected to the beatings, she seemed to think it was okay.

He was angry at watching Guzma, who had only shown him nothing but love and kindness, drop his tough guy act when no one was around to see it and show that he really was suffering. He was angry at watching every minute where Guzma's sanity seemed to slip, knowing that he could have been a sweet and friendly kid if it weren't for the constant torture his father subjected him to on a near daily basis or the selective obliviousness of his mother, who should have been protecting her baby instead of telling him that he should stop provoking his father into hitting him as though the beatings were completely Guzma's fault.

Every time Guzma began to display troubling behavior, such as yelling at or hurting himself, often for no reason but always with the belief that he'd been a failure at something, Wimpod felt more and more enraged knowing that his master had done nothing to deserve the mental trauma that would likely remain with him for a lifetime. As he brushed his face in a gentle nuzzle against Guzma's arms and felt the raised scars of self-inflicted wounds that he would later try to cover up with tattoos, Wimpod felt himself practically boiling in his shell.

The love and desire to protect Guzma and the anger towards his parents might have been the motivation he needed to evolve. As a wimpod he could do nothing to defend his master from the beatings, but there wasn't a single person on this planet that would willingly provoke a golisopod defending its trainer.

Late one night when Guzma finally decided he had enough and started packing a bag, Wimpod sat on the floor next to him, patiently waiting to come along, knowing there was no way that Guzma would allow his only friend to stay behind in this household while he left. It was particularly obvious that he was intended to come along when he saw Guzma pack Wimpod's favorite stuffed kakuna, the one that he'd chewed both the claws off of that Guzma had given him as a surrogate snuggle buddy for when it wasn't safe for Wimpod to come out of hiding.

Wimpod saw that brief moment of fear on his friend's face when the door to his room slammed open, heard a drunken proclamation of anger when Guzma's father saw the pokemon on the floor that he knew shouldn't be there and demanded to know where he came from, and that was when Wimpod finally snapped.

The best Wimpod could have done to protect his trainer would be to scurry at someone's feet and hope he could get a few bites in before he was squished. The best Golisopod could do was threaten to eat whomever dared to try to hurt Guzma.

Golisopod wondered if Guzma even knew that a wimpod could evolve into such a formidable and fierce pokemon or if that look on his face was merely surprise that his wimpod had evolved to protect him. Whether Guzma expected it or not, his father certainly hadn't. It felt satisfying knowing that he was the one who was scared this time.

Having Golisopod on his side seemed to give Guzma that bit of courage that he'd lacked before and he was clearly enjoying this as much as Golisopod was as he used his pokemon to threaten his own father into submission. Guzma tossed his bag over his shoulder and led Golisopod out, ignoring his mother's pleas for him to stay and her empty promises that things would be different and his father wouldn't hurt him anymore if he did so.

Guzma and Golisopod were homeless now, but neither of them cared too much about the fact. Guzma was free to catch more of his beloved bugs without the fear that his faithful companions would meet an untimely demise in a drunken bout of rage and Golisopod no longer feared that he had to hide to avoid being eaten. He caught sight of the wingulls cowering from him in terror and made a satisfied hum when he recognized a knick on the wing of one of them that identified it as one of the wingulls from the night where his master had rescued him.

Neither of them would ever have to fear from predators again.


End file.
